Throwing out the baby with the bathwater

Wednesday. The sun struggles up another beautiful day.

Brazil is teetering.

Adrian Walker tamps down the rhetoric on defunding the police in Boston. It’s actually more about reallocating some money out of the police budget and into community development than defunding the police. But here in Boston, money in the police budget is already being applied to community efforts. Why put money from the police budget into community development? Because initiatives like the Youth Development Fund are long-term crime prevention and they link the police with community development, which helps to bolster police legitimacy, an important ingredient for a healthy self-governing society. In the heat of the moment we shouldn’t rush to eliminate a strategic civic model that works. We should, instead, enhance and reinforce it.

Wow, that is one clean subway train.

Young Kennedy is getting schooled by old man Markey in this season’s least watched reality show. Scott Lehigh covers the senatorial debates. Michael Jonas weighs in as well.

And in China, it’s raining men. They’re coming out of the woodwork. So there’s a proposal afoot to allow each woman to have two husbands.

Getting the cold shoulder

Tuesday rolls around. It’s a birthday for both Jackie Wilson and Jackie Mason.

So it all comes down to doughnuts.

In North Korea, the sister of Kim Jong Un, Kim Yo Jong, is gaslighting South Korean President Moon Jae-in, according to an article in the Washington Post. The regime has been pretty successful lately in its efforts to manipulate international rivals.

Based on Boston police reports, John Ellement recounts a crazy night of protests and riots and also protesters vs. rioters.

In Marco Island, Florida, a Florida Man showed up to a protest with an AR-15 over his shoulder and was arrested by the local PD. When asked about the gun, he said that he might be going fishing later.

And stand-up comics are coming to the drive in. Honk if you think that joke was funny.

Fools rush in

Monday, the 8th of June, 2020. Today is the anniversary of 1984.

How do you read a science paper? With a grain of salt and dash of social media verification.

Calls to defund the police to the point of elimination are a bridge too far for most people (not to mention a potential Republican talking point.) It’s a bad idea. I’ve seen Camden, NJ held up as place where it actually happened, but Camden was more of a city-to-county reorganization. There are more cops in Camden now, not less.

80% of the country thinks things are out of control. Sounds about right. The president wants to address the nation in a televised speech to talk about race and unity. This should be interesting. I can almost hear advisors begging and pleading, “stick to the teleprompter.” But, you know…

Tim Kirk reports on a march in Dublin to honor George Floyd.

There are two more articles today looking at police unions, one from The New Yorker and the other from the Huffington Post.

And the treasure of the Rocky Mountains has been found. Eureka!

Hand wringing

A nice Sunday cool-down. The word of the day is advocate. (The verb, not the noun.)

Another union gets behind Markey. He’s added the teachers to his list of endorsements.

U-Mass professors are aghast (not to mention, “shocked, appalled, and astonished”) at police using their empty parking lots for staging. Professor Jeff Melnick, who is “engaged with the relationship that obtains between the “real” and the “representational”,” is especially upset with the symbolism of the situation because U-Mass is “literally in Dorchester,” whatever that means.

Here are mugshots of some of the people trying to turn peaceful protests into riots.

A court has reversed a decision by the Department of the Interior to take land from the Mashpee Wampanoag, which would have threatened the tribe’s sovereignty. This all started with a casino and somehow president Trump is also involved.

The Times looks at the power of police unions and how they often stand in the way of substantive reform.

And WBUR does a Q&A with themselves about retail stores reopening in Massachusetts on Monday. Some pretty good info in there, actually.

Pick your poison

Happy Saturday. Haircut day, finally.

The Portland Press Herald has a message for President Trump.

The MBTA governing board has decided, as its own little protest, to stop transporting Boston Police officers on T buses when they deploy to large public events. One of the reasons that the police use those buses is to minimize the number of cruisers parked in places that could become volatile, where those cars might incite the situation or be burned or vandalized. Not to mention that getting a lot of cops around in cars through crowds is dangerous for everybody. And, this gesture apparently doesn’t even apply to the MBTA’s own police force. They can still ride the buses. How does any of this make sense? It really doesn’t.

It’s not a healthy thing for this country when anonymous federal and military police are deployed to solve local problems. But that’s what’s happening. It would be fruitless for our local politicians to try to defund their local police only to have them replaced with nameless federal agents or soldiers. Worse, not better.

In the Sunday Book Review, A.O. Scott writes about Wallace Stegner. I always thought Stegner was underrated. There’s a depth and craft to his writing that you don’t see often with other writers. And speaking of other writers, when Stegner was teaching in the creative writing program at Stanford, among his students were Wendell Berry, Sandra Day O’Connor, George V. Higgins, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry. That’s not a bad legacy.

And the pizzas just keep on coming. Bad news for a guy in Belgium but good news if you like news that reads like a Python sketch.

Knee deep in the big muddy

Whew. Friday. Today is Festival of Popular Delusions Day.

Brooks Brothers is facing tough times. The company is considering closing factories, one of which is located in Massachusetts. It would be a shame if they went under.

In 1968, as the country was bogged down in Vietnam, Walter Cronkite gave his dire assessment of the war effort to the American people on the evening news. Shortly afterward Lyndon Johnson decided not to seek reelection. “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” he was reported to have said. No one watches the evening news anymore. But if there is a comparable bell-weather these days it might be The Rock. And it looks like Trump has lost The Rock.

Condoleezza Rice is speaking out.

More on police unions from Ed Davis and Frank Hartmann. Brianne Fitzgerald is a nurse who works with Boston Police and she has some thoughts about the department. Patrick Skinner is a cop in Savannah and he wrote an op-ed describing his version of community policing. A local councillor in Minneapolis wants to abolish the police department in the city. And Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, discusses reform, noting that changing how the police operate, and reducing the scope of their responsibilities, will be complex and politically charged.

Qualified immunity is also on the table. People on both / sides of the ideological gap have questioned the legality and fairness of the practice and now the Supreme Court is considering taking a case to address the issue. That would be a game changer.

And even cop shows on TV are a hot-button issue. Reruns of Barney Miller may be just what the country needs.

A glass jaw

A warm Thursday. It’s the 115th day of the year and it’s Bruce Dern’s 83rd birthday.

Should the city buy all the liquor licenses and then lease them back to businesses? It sounds like a good idea but as the head of the licensing board tells us, the devil is in the details. Katie Trojano fills us in.

Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins took out the broad brush on police use of force and her remarks caught the attention of the BPPA, who released a statement criticizing her rhetoric. But Rollins’ response, asking the union about their silence on the Floyd killing, underscored her point. Police unions have been an important driver for raising wages for the city’s middle class public safety workers, helping to promote professionalism and ensure safe working conditions, things I have personally benefited from. But too often in my (and others) experience, they get in the way on necessary discipline. You can’t be hard on crime for citizens and soft on crime for yourselves. And police unions across the country seem to be tone-deaf to the political environment that they operate in, antagonizing people by circling the wagons and opening themselves up for the kind of punch Rollins was easily able to land.

If Cannes hadn’t been cancelled because of the coronavirus, here are the movies that would have been screened.

I always saw the generals as the canary in the coal mine on the whether we should be worried about who’s running the country. I think what they’re saying now is, we should be worried.

And who says British television is boring. Poor Rudy.

Complete domination

It’s a nice Wednesday morning. Another sleepy, dusty delta day.

If you like cheese, now is the time to buy from New England cheesemakers. Their sales have been hit hard by the pandemic. France is having the same problem and has declared it a patriotic duty to eat cheese. I’m on board with that.

Policing, and especially using coercive force, requires hard-earned legitimacy and local knowledge. The feds don’t have that, nor does the military. The TSA certainly doesn’t. Chuck Wexler is right, this overuse of federal assets is a recipe for chaos.

In a Globe Ideas piece, a couple of “old guys” with policing experience dating back to the 70’s write about the problems with policing today. And in the Wall Street Journal another op-ed takes the view that there are no problems in policing today. Maybe that’s the problem.

Thomas Friedman is not optimistic that leaders in government can keep the country together and functional through the next election. Everyone seems to have a vested interest in division, except, maybe, business leaders. But not the ones who run social networks. For them, division is where the money is.

And in what might be the last chapter in the Tiger King saga, Carole Baskin has been awarded ownership of Joe Exotic’s zoo. Well, rustle my mullet.

A surfeit of ignorance

Tuesday today. It’s the anniversary of the anarchist bombings of 1919.

Office buildings were cleared to open up for workers yesterday but where are the workers? Still at home.

A report from Italy suggested that the coronavirus had mutated to a weaker version. Scientists and experts aren’t buying it. Human behavior is much more adaptable than the virus is at this point and that’s more likely to be responsible for any changes in infection rates. But even with six months of scientific scrutiny, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the coronavirus. The Times summarizes our ignorance.

Who’s instigating the rioting? It’s tempting to look for a simple answer but reality is always more complicated. That said, the involvement of young white guys like Bartel, at the core of the violence, is more common than people may think.

To raise taxes or not to raise taxes. That is the question for Massachusetts as revenue has shrunk and spending has accelerated during the crisis. Actually it’s not as simple as only raising taxes. Service cuts and layoffs are also in the mix and it’s all against a backdrop of seeding future economic growth. A group of economists have a recommendation for state leadership. The president of the Beacon Hill Institute rebuts.

And Troy Hunt looked into the data breach of the Minneapolis Police Department attributed to Anonymous and found that it wasn’t what it seemed.

An inflection point

Monday, June 1st. The morning after.

It was a rough night in Boston. Waves of looting and destruction. A long night for the police. (The Dig has some on-the-ground photos taken by Keiko Hiromi.) There’s a community cleanup going on this morning.

It was the same story across the nation. Minneapolis, the starting point with the killing of George Floyd, was relatively quiet last night, but in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chicago and Portland, violence escalated. More than 4000 people were arrested across the country over the weekend. Crowds in Washington DC gathered outside the White House and then moved into surrounding areas where they vandalized property and looted stores.

There was one nice moment in Birmingham, Alabama, though.

So this is what a politically divided America looks like. We’ve seen riots and looting before but it seems different this time. The national government is dysfunctional and can’t rise to the occasion. The media is amplifying tension on both sides. The president, when he weighs in at all, is making things worse, not better. There is no touchstone. It’s a difficult time for the country. The future is cloudy.

And we’re still in the midst of a pandemic. Imagine that.